This dissertation examines the ethnicization of Islam among a specific ethnic group in China, namely the Hui. It is based upon sixteen months of multi-sited fieldwork conducted in China's Henan Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region from 2010 to 2012. I argue that the particular ethno-imaginary of the Hui and their positioning vis-à-vis the Han majority - that they are both non-Han and more Han than the Han - are predicated upon a particular sexual economy. Islam is situated in an imagined dissymmetrical exchange of woman as that whose presumed truth can procure for the Hui the feminine "Han blood." The "nativization" of Islam among the Hui, i.e. its supposedly never complete "sinicization," occurs through the figure of the Han woman. In Part I of this dissertation, I trace the itinerary of this figure in both historiographical narratives of the Hui in the early twentieth century and the organizational variations of their contemporary life as Muslims in a swiftly-changing China. In Part II, I move to a more general level, and study two major institutions in the Chinese state's governance of ethnic difference, namely ethnic regional autonomy and ethnic cadre. I situate them within the socialist tradition and unpack their specificity in contrast to other political configurations in the governance of ethnic difference (e.g. liberal multiculturalism). I suggest that this socialist governance of difference is defined by a biopolitical logic, and argue that the link to sexuality that is intrinsic to the concept of biopolitics renders the Hui a particularly privileged site for exploring the complex relationship between the socialist politics of ethnicity and the socialist governance of sexuality.

This dissertation examines two educational piety projects competing for control over popular conceptualizations of piety and what it means to be a good Muslim, as presented by Al Azhar 31 Islamic Primary School and Luqman al Hakim Integrated Islamic Primary School in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Al Azhar 31 promotes an Indonesian Islam, pluralistic and inclusive of multi-tradition approaches to Islam that is flexible in regards to acceptable forms of worship. Luqman al Hakim SIT promotes a transnational Islam, inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and linked to the Indonesian Islamic political party, Prosperous Justice Party (Partai Keadilan Sejatera, PKS). The school's purificationist approach pushes for the removal of local customs and traditions from mainstream Islam and promotes exacting observance of standardized practices. These two schools' disparate approaches to Islam are emblematic of the larger polarizing trends in approaching Islam in Indonesia today. This dissertation has particular significance for understanding the intersection of Islamic movements, Islamic education, and the religious middle class. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, this dissertation demonstrates how schooling can be a tool for shaping socio-religious and political climates of a community and country. It adds to the growing literature on the educational spaces developing alongside Islamic piety movements throughout the Muslim world. Additionally, this dissertation provides a rare example of the influence on Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood ideologies on education, rather than politics. It also illustrates how the schools' disparate approaches to Islam shape distinct religious subjectivities within their students. The documentation of the innovation of the extended-day Islamic school model and integrated Islam ideology employed by both schools adds to the rich history of Indonesia's Islamic schooling traditions. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates how middle class parents' classed aspirations and anxieties regarding education, wealth, morality, and corruption coalesce to create ready consumers for a particular type of Islamic school: one that provides a longer school day, strong academics, and a robust religious curriculum focused on Islamic morals and values.

"Afterlife of Empire" explores Ottoman cultural, social, and political continuities in Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg administration (1878-1914). The research focuses on the enduring influence of the Ottoman Empire - an influence perpetuated both by the efforts of the Ottoman imperial state, and by the former subjects in Bosnia Herzegovina itself to explain the lingering aftereffects of the Ottoman Empire in the province. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that the Ottoman subjects and the former territories did not stop being Ottoman in any significant sense immediately after the separation from the empire, and that the break with the empire was not that of rupture, but characterized by enduring features of the empire that evolved to respond to diplomatic and strategic interests in the region. A shift from the common inclination to analyze the Habsburg period as the introduction of modernity, and a focus, not on the national/ethnic framework constructed around identity, but on the overlapping, multiple loyalties in this study convey a more accurate representation of the period and an assessment of what legitimacy and sovereignty meant in this region. By drawing on Ottoman and Bosnian archival sources in focusing on Bosnia's overlapping imperial, regional, religious, linguistic, and cultural frameworks, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of considering the Ottoman context after its formal departure, and the significance of incorporating Islamic intellectual history in understanding the past and present of Bosnia Herzegovina and Southeastern Europe in general.

This dissertation is a study of contemporary forms of Quranic learning among women in urban Pakistan. Over the last two decades, Quran study programs which promise an in-depth and personal knowledge of the text, have become immensely popular among educated women from all backgrounds in urban centers of Pakistan. Placing an emphasis on developing skills for reading and understanding the Quran, such programs of study have adopted an approach to textual engagement that departs significantly from previously dominant modes of recitation and memorization of the Quran in everyday practices of ritual devotion. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among women participants of Quranic study, this dissertation investigates these sites of learning to highlight the competencies, logics and modes of argumentation that are encouraged and cultivated among women readers of the Quran. It locates the shift from Quranic recitation to reading within a genealogy of the modernist exegetical tradition popularized by Syed Abul Ala Maududi in the mid-twentieth century in South Asia which made the `ordinary' reader its main focus rather than the scholarly world of the Ulama. It foregrounds this as the condition under which a popular hermeneutics of the Quran emerges in contemporary Pakistan and demonstrates how privileging a modality which illuminates the Quran's `true' meaning steers conceptions about the text and its role in defining ethical action for women readers. This study analyzes how contemporary practices of Quranic hermeneutics by `ordinary' women rely on the ethical cultivation of interpretive agency which is generated simultaneously by notions of the autonomous self and a normative understanding of Quranic injunctions. Through an analysis of women's experiences of reading, it shows that Quranic study in these sites occurs at the nexus of competing modalities of textual engagement in which women combine religious and secular capacities, skills and sensibilities for reflection on the Quran's meaning. It highlights the ways in which seemingly contradictory modes of reflection--one which is critical and another which is governed by devotional affect--are productively reconfigured together for discerning the ethical import of Quranic injunctions and their insertion into the idioms governing everyday life. This dissertation argues that such a mode of appreciation produces a unique register for reflecting on the Quran's pedagogical potential, thus imbuing the desire for `reading as understanding' with the promise of personal and collective social transformation. It also unravels assumptions about the discreteness of the spheres governed by religiosity and secularity in a post-colonial context and enables for a consideration of the ways in which the intersection between the two have been productive of new modalities of womanhood, sociality, and politics.

Zakat (almsgiving), sedekah (donation, giving) and waqf (religious endowment) are forms of philanthropy Muslims in Indonesia, as well as in other parts of the world practice. This thesis examines the historical development of Islamic philanthropy and questions how Islamic philanthropic activities have affected the relationship between faith and the state. It discusses a contestation between the state and Muslim civil society in managing Islamic philanthropy. / The thesis shows that the history of Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia is one of rivalry between faith and the state: between efforts to involve the state in managing philanthropic activities and efforts to keep them under the control of Muslim civil society which uses Islamic philanthropy to empower itself and to promote social change. Activities and efforts to modernise Islamic philanthropic practices have mostly been supported by Reformist Muslims in their aim to Islamise society and by Islamists who aim to Islamise the state. The interrelation between Muslim civil society and the state in the history of Islamic philanthropy in Indonesia is dynamic. It demonstrates a contested balance between private faith and the public realm, or between Muslim civil society and the state. From the time of the Islamic monarchs, through the period of Dutch colonialism and up to contemporary Indonesia, there have been different levels of development and interest in Islamic philanthropy, either from the rulers or from Muslim civil society. / Philanthropy is an indication of the strength of civil society. Throughout Islamic Indonesian history, there has been a balance between the efforts to either keep philanthropy under the control of Muslims or to institutionalise it under state control. When the state was weak, philanthropy developed powerfully and was used to challenge the state. When the state was strong and powerful, Muslim civil society tended to weaken but still found ways to use philanthropic practices in the public sphere to promote social change. In modern-day Indonesia this phenomenon is very much still the practice. / While state imposition of philanthropic practices, in particular zakat, has been contested, philanthropy remains a firm basis of civility. The thesis argues that although political circumstances influence the development of Islamic philanthropy, the state‘s capacity to control it is sharply limited because Muslim philanthropic practice is generated by the altruistic and reciprocal nature of people. For the most part, Islamic philanthropy remains in the hands of Muslim civil society, irrespective of the political nature of the state.

The majority of Muslims believe that the best era in their history was that of the Prophet Muhammad and his orthodox successors, and that the best rulers who ever governed Muslims are the Prophet and his successors. Therefore the Muslims in our own time are inspired by their works and words in many aspects of life, and hope still to follow their model behaviour. This attitude became clear immediately after the creation of Pakistan when the people began to discuss the necessity of establishing a constitution which should be based on the rules of Qur'an, the practice of the Prophet, and, the precedents of his orthodox successors. Yet the nature of the governmental system of the Prophet Muhammad is still ambiguous in the minds of Muslims, and it is hard to find any scientific study on this subject. Therefore it was felt that it might be useful to choose "the governmental system of the Prophet Muhammad" to be the subject of this thesis, and to study it in the light of the theories of state which are known in the field of constitutional law, in order to clarify the form and nature of "the Prophetic government". The thesis consists of five chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter explains how the Islamic state was established and extended to govern most of Arabia. The second chapter presents the idea of sovereignty and authority in the Islamic state. The third deals with the three authorities - legislative, executive, and judiciary - in the Islamic state. In the fourth chapter the writer tries to define the nature of the governmental system of the Prophet and the relations between its powers. The fifth chapter is devoted to explaining the position of the Islamic state on the rights of equality and liberty. The conclusion contains the summary of the main points dealt with in the thesis. It will be a source of satisfaction to the writer if this work should participate in clarifying the governmental system which the Prophet Muhammad established, and if in the near future an opportunity is found to study the development of this system in the era of the Prophet's successors.

This dissertation is based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with seminarian women in Iran in the summer of 2008, and from 2010 to 2011. I ask, after having unprecedented access to the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) after the revolution, what have been some of the consequences for the howzevi? And, how do women in the howzeh elmiyeh see themselves? Through grounded method of analysis, I have found that in their pursuit of what constitutes `a good life', the howzevi of this study were actively attempting to transform themselves and the howzeh setting, their social relationships, and the greater Iranian society at large by exploring resources available to them within a set of constraints. These limitations were often not only self-imposed but also intensified with increased access to particular networks. In the following chapters I argue for an alternative way of looking at, and talking about, the howzevi who are now positioned in institutions that have emerged at the core of the ongoing struggles to shape a particular Iran. The term howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) may be defined as Islamic theological institutions of higher religious learning where a personal teacher-student transmission of knowledge, oral and written, of Islamic Jurisprudence and other ancilliary Islamic sciences would take place. As you may know, in Muslim populated countries like Pakistan, the howzeh is also known as a madrasa. Unlike devotees of Catholic seminaries, however, students of the howzeh elmiyeh neither observe celibacy nor are physically secluded from the rest of society. Rather, they are, and have been, an integral part of the urban landscape in Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq from the ninth century A.D. (Berkey 2003; Bulliet 1972; Chamberlain 1994). The howzevi of this study were between the ages of eighteen to sixty years-old, and were at different stages of their education. Some were unmarried and in the early stages of their education. Some were married with children and completing doctoral research, while others were simultaneously teaching seminary classes, working on women's Islamic rights, and partaking in the Dars- e Kharij class (the highest level in the seminary) with Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the Supreme Leader. Belonging to the ultra- religious conservative population in Iran, their history of mobility was limited inside the home before the 1979 revolution. Absent in the anthropological literature of women in the Middle East and women in contemporary Islamic higher education, the institutionalization of the howzeh elmiyeh (seminaries) for women in Iran was a project that had been in the works before the revolution. Its formalization emerged publicly only in 1984 through the combined efforts of groups of revolutionary Islamist women in petitioning Ayatollah Khomeini for the establishment of Jami'at Al-Zahra in Qom. By Islamicizing public space, the revolution also enabled these women to move into the public sphere. Since then, the howzeh elmiyeh for women has been an ongoing statewide project through the active participation of women who credit the 1979 revolution for widespread access to this form of education. This opening amounts to a yearly average of 65,000 women attend the women's howzeh all over Iran, excluding graduates since about 1984. Annually, the howzeh elmiyeh turns away ten percent of applicants (Sakurai 2011) because the infrastructure cannot yet accomodate the demand for women's enrollment. This support for the howzevi remains unparalleled throughout the history of Shi'i Islamic scholarship in the Shi'i Islamic world. After the 1979 revolution, the access which the women of the intellectual clerical elite had to Islamic education for women was extended to "all women"; all women, who, at least, were willing to observe the social constraints of the howzevi lifestyle, regardless of the socioeconomic group they belonged to, and/or the fact that they did not come from an intellectual Shi'i scholarly family. This served a purpose, however. The revolutionary state appropriated the concept of the howzeh elmiyeh for women (Adelkhah 2000) in order to produce a specific type of revolutionary woman. Notwithstanding, as the revolutionary state created a new public space for Islam (Adelkhah 2000), it also provided new leadership opportunities for women (Afary 2009; Najmabadi 2008; Sedghi 2007). Women students were able to embark on a fully-funded path towards potentially becoming, among other Islamic scholarly aspirations, a mujtahideh, a woman who may derive religious rulings for herself, a process called ijtihad, and who are also able to engage in discussions about Islamic laws and its applicability in Iranian society. This research is in conversation with how women in the Middle East are neither passive nor homogenous (Abu-Lughod 1993; Holmes-Eber 2003; Mahmood 2005; Osanloo 2009; Torab 2007), as well as within the discourse on society and the women's movement in Iran (Adelkhah 2000; Afary 2009; Afshar 1998; Bahramitash 2008; Kamalkhani 1998; Kian-Thiébaut 2002; Kunkler & Fazaeli 2012; Mahdavi 2007; Mir- Hosseini 1999; Moghissi 1994; Najmabadi 2008; Osanloo 2009; Paidar 1995; Poya 1999; Sakurai 2011, 2012; Sedghi 2007; Torab 2007; Varzi 2006).

Islam and Competing Nationalisms: The Kurds and the Turks in the late Ottoman Era is a work, which traces how religion was intimately intertwined with nationalism during the crucial period of the late nineteenth century in the Modern Middle East. In this approach, I call into question the extent to which the principle of secularism and ethnicity serve as the only foundations of the modern nation state. Within the context of the late Ottoman Empire, my research foregrounds the differences between interpretations of Islam at the center and the myriad understandings of Islam adopted by those on the margins. I demonstrate how diverse Muslim communities (Arabs, Kurds and Turks) have linked their interpretations of 'authentic' religion to claims of 'ethnic superiority' during the process of nation building. I contend that this tension between the normative State interpretation of Islam and alternative visions was critical in shaping modern nationalism in the Middle East. This is significant for establishing how nationalism can in turn affect the range of religious interpretations. My work thus provides a new historically grounded theoretical foundation for recent debates on nationalism that have emerged in recent decades. My dissertation is based on a close examination of British archival records, Ottoman state records, Ottoman journals and other primary sources in Arabic, Kurdish (both Kurmanci and Sorani dialects), Persian and modern Turkish -- most of which I obtained during my yearlong field research as a Fulbright scholar.

Founded by the Fatimids in 970 A.D., al-Azhar has been described variously as "the great mosque of Islam," "the brilliant one," "a great seat of learning...whose light was dimmed." Yet despite its assumed centrality, the illustrious mosque-seminary has elicited little critical study. The existing historiography largely relies on colonial-nationalist teleologies that are grounded in a strong centrifugal essentialism: positioning Cairo (and al-Azhar) at a center, around which faithfully revolve concentric peripheries. Setting its focus on the eighteenth century and beyond, this dissertation investigates the discursive postulates that organize the writing of the history of al-Azhar. Through textual explorations that pivot in space and time, it elucidates shifts in the entanglement of disciplines of knowledge with those of the self at a particular historical juncture and location. It thus locates al-Azhar in the modern order of knowledge, even as it imagines another intellectual universe bound by ideas, texts and authors who lived before and outside Europe: one which articulated itself in conceptual, epistemic, moral, social, cultural and institutional ways, modernity as such cannot not capture.

This dissertation uses the case of Pakistan to argue that the compatibility of shari'a and democracy depends on the design of institutions through which Islamist moral arguments are processed and which shape their interaction with liberal detractors. Instead of extrapolating Islamist intentions from theoretical tracts deemed canonical or from their official statements, this dissertation examines the link between ideas and institutions by mining a wide-range of English and Urdu-language texts from Pakistani courts, parliament, law journals, the advisory Council of Islamic Ideology and Women's Status Commissions, transnational rights advocacy NGO and Islamist publications, newspapers and TV debates, and 40-years of articles on democracy and state Islamic lawmaking from two leading madrassa journals. An analysis of 3 case studies of Islamic lawmaking reveals that the judiciary has been able to foster "authentic deliberation" between liberals and Islamists (which Guttman and Thompson define as reciprocal reasoning with civility and respect), leading to the moral accommodation of Islamists in the constitutional democratic order as well as steady advances in constitutionally-guaranteed fundamental rights. However, deliberation through political institutions - a legislature dominated by the executive branch, which has been alternately controlled by military dictators and civilian heads of internally undemocratic political parties - has led groups in power to pass desired laws without giving the minority side reasons internal to their moral framework, leading the losing side to declare the law "un-Islamic" and to later collaborate with military rulers to attain their desired change. By adopting the lens of "internal" vs. "external" reasoning to analyze the moral deliberation between liberals and Islamists during episodes of Islamic lawmaking, which is used by scholars of moral and political theory, particularly in the deliberative democracy tradition, I am able to suspend judgment about the content of Islamist positions. This allows me to show that their moral critique of liberalism is directed at the kind of liberalism advocated by transnational rights NGOs, which John Gray has described as the conception of liberalism as a "rational consensus on values," and that they have been the most ardent champions of what Gray has termed "modus vivendi" liberalism and which is indeed the arrangement embodied in Pakistan's constitutional and legal system, which has a dual commitment to shari'a and individual rights. Particularly, from 1978-85, there was a major structural shift in judicial reasoning when the mechanism of "Islamic judicial review" was introduced through shari'a courts, which were empowered to strike down laws as un-Islamic on citizen petition, or on their own initiative, and which were staffed by a minority of `ulama and a majority of common law judges, who were compelled to reason within the fiqh tradition (and depart from consensus-based opinions of the fuqaha only as a last resort, if there was no way to reconcile them with modern circumstances). From the accounts of legal scholars, the constitutional role granted to shari'a since the 1980s has led to a liberalization of colonial-era laws, while the judiciary has continued its steady expansion of women's rights in Muslim divorce law and in areas of law that do not entail a direct conflict with fiqh-based provisions. Superior court judges have pursued this liberalism through "creative compromise;" in public statements they have affirmed the constitution's commitment to gender equality but when dealing with the fiqh tradition, they pursue gender equality as a legal effect (pragmatism) rather than as a premise on the basis of which the fiqh tradition should be "reconstructed." While the latter is a Muslim modernist position and has been the demand of transnational rights advocacy NGOs since the 1980s, "gender equality" was never recognized as a premise in the fiqh tradition, much like other moral and religious traditions which posit the family as the basic social unit, and derive the mutual rights and duties of men and women from their role in the family. Contrary to the common representation of Islamists, in-depth evidence from Pakistan, especially in the last decade when judicial and media independence increased, shows that the main `ulama and Islamist electoral parties have shown flexibility in their positions, sometimes appropriating long-standing demands of women's rights campaigners for their own electoral platforms (to prove that they are women-friendly), while western-funded rights advocacy NGOs have maintained their original position that gender equality must be used as a premise to re-frame all laws, including fiqh-based laws.